get up

It seems to me that, once way ahead of an unpleasant thing, I can see the, heretofore unseen, benefits hidden in the turbulence, sadness and pain. At the time, in the thick of the thick of it, I am no more than a tumbleweed in a vast empty desert. All my supports have abandoned me. I am left entirely alone, and yet not alone because my thoughts, often my enemies, stick super close. Child, teenager, young wife, mother, disappointed dreamer, et la and la, all morphoses requiring me to change more often than I do my knickers. Life, anybody’s life, is like this. I sincerely doubt a single soul can say, truthfully, that everything that happened to them was just what they wanted and, better, predicted. Looking back, I can settle, somewhat, swatting away the bluebottles of Why and How, quick sharp, so they have no time to lay eggs in my brain. At this end of a long and adventurous life, I can see so much. Rejection strengthened me. Neglect taught me to love myself (eventually). Abandonment, judgement and loneliness made me resourcefulness, a respect and love of my own company. In short, I learned tactics, found tools, good tools, ones I can always rely on because I always keep them sharpened and greased. This is Reflectology.

The study of reflection is a good thing but, and there is always one of those, it is essential to remember that one life is just that. One change, one ticket to the dance, and balance is everything. To fall down and to stay down is a choice, presuming appropriate limbs are still strong. Something in me, deep, deep inside me, probably a bloody connection to my parents, will not let me stay in that down place for long. Oh, I can go there, all mawkish and brimming with self-pity, sinking into the black, the sadness, the regrets and the rage against any dimming at all, and then this Get up and Go does it’s thing anyway, patiently waiting for me to do the same. It stands there above me, all calm and cocky and that ‘we’ve been here before’ look on its face.

Go where? I whinge.

Who the frick cares, comes the reply. Just do it or that bus, see that number 38 rounding the bend, will flatten you and then what?

I’ll be flat, I say, defeated.

And useless, comes the eye-roll answer. I can’t make you, can’t lift you. You have to do that.

This has served me for decades. I could tell my grandchildren this, and they would puzzle. They expect someone else to lift them back up again, bring them back into the light, love them again, just as I did. It wonders me, the fairytales we read them, much as I love a fairytale. However, to read them ‘reality’ might just turn them into tumbleweeds on the spot. We learn slowly and by experience. We learn how strong we are only in times of war.

I fought everything and everyone as I did this tumbelweed thing. Not openly, covertly. I internalised the bad stuff. But it seems to have done me no harm, not when I reflect on the utter brilliance of my bonkers life. Yes, there were cuts and bruises, yes I felt rejected, abandoned, all of that, and very sharply, but here I am a septuagenarian, and still ready for whatever comes my way. The key, my key, is that I am thankful for all of it, even the shit times, and I honestly believe that such a choice, because that is what it is, means I can keep getting up, even if I have no idea where I’m going.

There is something about waiting that can create an internal chaos.

Waiting for a train or a flight. Waiting for a day to come or a person.

Waiting for life to change, or start, or end. Waiting for seeds to grow, for my turn to come in or to go out. For guests to arrive or leave.

For a new baby. For test results.

That last one has to be the worst.

I knew a very old lady, once, who had been a maid all her working life. She was deeply proud of being a maid, and would make sure you got it right, the title right, if, perchance you got in a fankle over political correctness. This woman had no time for such malarky. Just say it like it is, she would say, wagging a bent finger under your nose. Maid is maid, however you try to say it.

She used to name certain days, waiting days. These days, for her, as a country girl, were usually connected with the weather. A waiting day meant the sky was shut, the wind all blown out, everything just standing there or hanging there……waiting. Of course, the weather matters a lot when your family are land workers, which hers were. Whether to plant, of plough, harvest or lay out in rows to dry, all dependant on the weather, and if the weather was waiting for something to happen, it never explained what. Could be rain. Could be there was a kick-ass gale in the planning, just off stage and hidden from human view. In her day, there was the wirless, but no fancy satellite information about high pressures over Iceland. Just the local yokel out with his moisture meter – or his eyes looking up and his own gut feeling.

On her waiting days, she would do something. Clean the silver (not her own) or pull out the beds for a good ‘doing’ or tidy handkerchief drawers, that sort of something. Anything, basically, to fill in the waiting time, and, in the doing of something, she might calm her own anxieties.

We can learn from her.

If, whilst waiting, we focus on what we are waiting for, knowing with perfect clarity that, in doing so, we make absolutely no difference to the thing, but only serve to discombobulate ourself into a right stooshie, we might consider a different approach. Of course, if the thing we wait for is scary and deeply buried in the underworld, such as the results of a medical test with an alarming set of possibles attached, we will be unable to erase it completely from our thinking. But the mind is quite easily led, I have found, and can be eased into a different place, at least for a little while.

I agree that giving the silver a clean, supposing we have any in the first place, or pulling out the beds for a good ‘doing’ are hardly exciting options, but that, I believe, is the key. Dullard tasks can soothe our brilliant and dangerous minds into a calm humdrum.

It doesn’t take the worry away. It doesn’t change the end result. But it does ease the path from breakfast to lunch, from hour to hour, from Monday to Friday. It won’t be a smooth one, nor easy, but when the demons trip us up and make us fall, the best we can do is get up and try again.